This is a mini-blog. I'm working to find a compromise between a tweet and a lengthy essay. I find it difficult to complete longer documents because of an obsession with perfection. So this little experiment is to see if I can create a blog of mini articles. Herein I will talk about many technical things generally related to software development and Agile practices.

21 August 2017

Only the Living

So in consideration of source control, you may have heard, only the live/active code should be present in your repository. There are tons of discussions in the coderverse about comments, commented code, config files, certificates, and other things that should never be put into source control. An there are things in the codeverse that exist as part of your deployment but also aren't in source control (cache files, log files, etc.)What do you do about the dead stuff. Dead code should not even exist in your project to start with, but lets say it does for some reason. You should ruthlessly track down all that dead code and delete it with extreme prejudice.Here's why. All that dead code leads to confusion later down the line. For example, you have a module of code with dead functionality in it. You go on vacation to Aruba. While you are gone the team discovers an issue and needs to fix and redeploy that module of code. Their change breaks some tests for the dead code. Now what? Do we fix the dead code? Is it supposed to be dead? How come these things are touching? There should be no touching!Thats a simple example about code but what about dead Jenkins jobs, dead SALT states, dead scripts. But wait, theres more! What about those little dribbles of scripts and log files we leave behind on DEV and QA systems? Say, stuff we wrote to help us diagnose an issue. Or copies of things we made to avoid calamity. That's dead too. DELETE IT!These things (backups of log files, extra scripts, temp files, etc.) cause just as much confusion if not more than the dead code. This is especially true over time. A tmp folder created today might look important to someone else next month when PROD is down. It is important to clean these things up immediately after they have served their purpose.To summarize, if it isn't part of a prod deploy it doesn't really count. If it counts, it should be part of the prod deploy and therefore in source control. If it is dead, get rid of it rather than let it stink up the joint. Only the living code, configuration, files, should exist in your system.